


The Shepherd and the Yordle

by Bibliomania



Category: League of Legends
Genre: Action, Drama, Father-Son Relationship, Friendship, Gen, Past Character Death, Shurima, Violence, yordle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-13
Updated: 2019-02-13
Packaged: 2019-10-27 07:37:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17762582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bibliomania/pseuds/Bibliomania
Summary: Shurima is riddled with dangers. Buried beneath the sands, infesting ancient ruins, lording over massive expanses of the unforgiving terrain.Taliyah thought she’d seen them all.At least, until a bloody trail through the desert led her to discover one more.





	1. Lore

**Author's Note:**

> The Shepherd and the Yordle was based on the character Mahotis created by BitterBlossom (aka. Bristol). The character lore below was included with BitterBlossom's permission and can be found at https://mahotiss.tumblr.com/. The main story, written by Bibliomania, takes place in the second chapter. The third chapter...is a surprise.

Within the dunes of the desert, in the shadow of the shining Capital, there lived a group of prosperous yordles who lived in harmony with the ancient Shurimans. But after the fall of Shurima, only one managed to survive. 

His parents named him ‘Mahotis’, a centuries-old name that embraced a now dead dialect. 

The small yordle was raised among the Shuriman people, who welcomed the furry fella as if he were a human. He was always curious and interested in the culture of the Shuriman empire; but more specifically, he has always been fascinated by the gold that the culture would pour onto everything. The glistening beauty of the substance always dazzled him. 

Mahotis spent most of his early life as an apprentice to goldsmiths who smelted and treated gold so would appear immaculate and bright for centuries, and to blacksmiths who made the hardest metals. To him, it was almost an obsession! He took working gold very seriously. 

He soon started off as a jewelry designer, but quickly became a true blacksmith. In only a few years he had gained the knowledge of how to create tools, weapons, and other items at a worthy quality.

He had lived his life uncaring of the political aspects of Shurima. He stayed oblivious to the turmoil, but he had never really put interest into it. The clear usage of slaves was normalized among the people, but within the small community of yordles, the slaves were pitied and helped as they could. 

This feeling grew more intense every day, and despite the brown furred yordle’s ignorance of the ascension and other important political matters, he could sense that something was about to happen. 

Days before the night of the tragedy, he decided the get out of his workshop, not just for resources gathering, but also to take off his mouth the bitterness that the empire was sending all over the yordle community.

A few days before the tragedy, the blacksmith yordle left his workshop to scavenge the dunes of the arid wasteland at night. It was almost ritualistic for Mahotis, scouring for scraps of metal found in the sand, which were very useful for smelting and blacksmithing. But, during his search, the sand under his feet gave way, and he fell into a tunnel system that’s existed for a while already, glowing crystals decorated the dark echoes of the unexplored cave. 

In Shurima, caves like this are rumored to have treasure or hold the key to eternal life, so naturally, the curious yordle explored. He managed to navigate the system, and he finally reached the end only to find an ornate, but worthless bowl containing bright gold sand.

He was disappointed and in a fit of frustration kicked the bowl causing sand to fly in the air and coat his fur. 

A kick frozen in time for centuries, for the sand that spilled on him was no ordinary sand, but sand blessed by Zhonya herself.

The yordle turned into a golden statue and remained in stasis for centuries. When he opened his eyes, he was buried alive in a tomb of sand and stone. His bones and teeth turned black, a side effect of remaining in stasis for so long.

Time passed to him like a blink of the eyes, one instance he was kicking a bowl of sand, the next he was trapped under debris. It was a sliver of sunlight that woke him. Barely able to breathe, screaming and flailing, he dug his way to the surface. 

It wasn’t almost night anymore, It was the middle of the day, somehow. The yordle was worried but not afraid and chose to go back to his village to see what had happened

He walked back to his village and kept walking and kept walking. He should have reached it by now, but there was no village, no city, just endless desert

His wandering was interrupted by a group of nomads, he beamed in happiness when he found someone else, he asked about home, but they couldn’t understand his words. His language was archaic to the nomads and the yordle went completely misunderstood. Mahotis tried explaining, flailing his arms angry, but no matter what he said, the nomads couldn’t understand. 

They pointed him in a direction and yelled at him in a modern language: “Home, Home!” Mahotis didn’t know what to do, so he walked where they pointed. The nomads tried to send him to Kalamanda, a region of Shurima under the control of the Councilman Reyes, and with that, he started walking, until there was no sand under his feet.

 **OTHER INFOS** :

Mahotis bones are BLACK. Its a side effect of so many YEARS in stasis. 

He is fairly strong and powerful. Lotsa lifting hammers and other blacksmith tools. 


	2. The Shepherd and the Yordle

The Shuriman landscape, to the outside observer, was an endless span of dull, lifeless sand occasionally interrupted by stretches of featureless rock. Hundreds had forfeited their lives, choking on the dry air among vast field of dunes, hopelessly lost after misinterpreting a random spire of stone for a notable landmark written on a useless scrap of parchment.

Shurima could not be mapped. The sand shifted in the day, coming to a rest at night and burying hundreds of tons of stone in the span of a few meager hours. Landmarks, today recorded as massive columns reaching into the sky, could be hidden underfoot tomorrow.

It was a place of death. A slow, agonizing suffocation as the land itself worked to kill you.

But Taliyah saw it differently.

As she walked along a valley of rock, worn into a “V” by a river long dried out, she saw not a land of desolation, but a world of art. The varying colors of bedding forming the valley’s slopes, though obsolete to an ignorant eye, told a story to Taliyah.

It told her of a time when the wind blew far fiercer than now, depositing large numbers of pebbles. It hinted at an age where a vast ocean enveloped the land, leaving layers of mud-rock in its place. A time where clay was mixed in with the sand. When an earthquake wracked the ground and cracked the rock, when flora and fauna flourished with such veracity, their images were imparted unto the earth in death.

And the colors – such rich, vibrant colors. Yellows so soft and rich, one would mistake the ground for honey, yet others as fierce and intense as amber. Oranges flowed in between, dark and bold like cider, yet others light and gentle as the flesh of a cantaloupe.

And red. Deep, passionate red spotted the valley and injected life into the desert, like the life passing through Taliyah’s own veins.

However, as Taliyah looked closer, she noticed some of the red wasn’t ingrained by time. Instead, it was splashed haphazardly along the rock, without rhyme or rhythm as it trailed along the valley. Bending down to examine a patch of the red, she tucked in the sleeves of her crimson robes, careful not to disturb the earthen jewelry at her shoulders.

Though long dry, the red flaked off easily under her fingers, wafting the smell of iron into the air.

“ _Blood_ ,” Taliyah thought, rubbing the flakes between her fingers. She stood, taking in the repeating patches as they continued along the valley. She smiled, “ _Perfect_.”

Not one night ago, an older ewe in her herd, only days away from birthing a lamb of her own, had screamed into the night. It was a loud, shrill sound that woke Taliyah instantly. Though in the moments it had taken to rush from her tent and into her flock, the poor ewe was gone. Brutal carnage sat in her place, flecks of her white pelt scattered among the sand, and the poor animal’s blood trailed into the darkness.

The predators of Shurima, though strong, shared a feeling of desperation. Food was scarce, starvation was common, and if there was easy prey to be found, it would be devoured until nothing remained. If a predator had found her sheep once, Taliyah realized, it would do it again.

So, as soon as the sun rose, Taliyah had left her herd in the care of her father and ventured off into the desert, following the distinct trail of blood.

And now she was here, following the same trail through the evening light, dozens of kilometers away from the caravan, and deep into reaches of the desert where she had never tread before. She could have reached further had she used her gifts, but tracking was a delicate skill, one that required keen vision and strong insight when the trail threatened to run cold. There was no way she could have followed the path flying at breakneck speeds across the sands.

Though at this point, her feet aching and the sun preparing to dip below the horizon, she was tempted to summon and relax on a boulder…at least until the trail ran cold again.

But then, at the end of the valley and far in the distance, Taliyah spotted something strange. She rubbed her eyes and looked again, but the sight before her did not vanish. It was something incredibly rare in the desert, so much so that she only saw it in extraordinarily rare stones and herbs carried by a select few nomads, ones originating from beyond the desert.

The color green.

She quickened her pace, jogging through the valley until the speck of green grew larger and larger, the walls of the valley growing further apart. Soon, the small shred of green grew into a sea of emerald canopy. Taliyah skidded to a halt as the path dropped into a steep slope, staring wide-eyed at the sight before her.

An oasis. One of the few rare places in Shurima where life did not struggle but flourished in abundance. It sat in a crater, surrounded on three sides by a ring of towering cliffs and, directly opposite of Taliyah to the north, emptied out into open, sandy dunes.

Taliyah had never seen anything like it. This oasis, one that filled her with slack-jawed awe, was nothing like the springs her caravan would occasionally stumble upon, meager pools supporting only the sickliest of reeds. This…this was extraordinary – otherworldly. Lush vegetation. Trees with dense, healthy leaves dangling in the evening sun. Bright, succulent fruit hanging heavily from the branches. Bushes and ferns and vines and more all sat in blissful tranquility before her. Had she been younger, a few years shaved off her current late teens, she might have fallen to her knees and shed tears at the sight.

But she was not a child. She was a woman on a mission.

Taliyah inspected the trail, seeing the bloody evidence cease partially down the slope. If she had to guess, the oasis below was the predator’s home. Vegetation, healthy fruit, and, though she could hardly make it out among the canopy, a water source, it was an excellent place to lurk.

On a whim, she spared a glance at the rock walls to either side of the opening she had emerged from. She gasped. Deep into the cliff face, as though torn out, entire sections of rock were missing. Taliyah carefully maneuvered onto the slopes below and approached the craters. One opening was massive, far larger than herself, and reached further back into darkness than she could see. She inspected it with a single hand. It certainly wasn’t a force of nature; the rock was ripped out as though by Tailyah’s own ability. Except, as she noticed the multitude of cracks and messy, gagged surface, it was clear the rock was physically, forcefully removed.

“My God,” Taliyah whispered. Several species across Shurima were known to burrow into the ground to make their dens, but solid rock? “How strong is this creature?”

She turned to the sprawling oasis, then the sky above.The sun had all but disappeared below the horizon, making way for a full moon on what promised to be another cloudless night. She took a seat on the lip of the hollow, planning out her next move.

For all she knew, the predator hunted at night, was confident enough to target burly game, and, based on the swift nature of last night’s attack, preferred to strike when the target was asleep. Taliyah could go in rocks swinging, leveling the fauna and flushing the creature out, but she decided it was a poor move. It could merely run or hide until she tired and left, then go right back to its sheep-killing routine.

No. To take this thing down, she had to bring it out into the open. Make it show itself, then go in for the kill. But how could she…

“Ohhhhhhh,” Taliyah groaned, burying her face into her hands. “Father will chain me to the tent if he hears of what I’m about to do.”

And so, at the same time the moon reached its highest point in the sky, Taliyah lie on the shore of the pool she had spotted, futilely trying to coax herself into sleep. The warm, soft earth beneath her was far more comfortable than her own sleeping mat at home with the caravan, but it didn’t matter. She was playing the role of bait. Who could sleep under that pressure?

It was simple. How do you attract a predator? Present it with prey. And sadly, Taliyah did not have the foresight to bring a lamb with her, so she would have to do.

And, to a predator, she would appear mouthwatering. A lone female, asleep in the open, fully visible under the light of the moon, how could it resist?

Of course, Taliyah wasn’t stupid. While she might have failed to complete the illusion with actual sleep, everything else was prepared perfectly. Around her, scattered across the shore from the trees to the water, Taliyah had buried hundreds of slabs of slate, cut thin enough to break with a crunch if any weight was applied. With her ability, it had been easy to collect the stone from the surrounding valley, direct it down into the oasis below, and wiggle each sheet beneath the sand.

All it took was one misstep, one stone cracked in the night, and Taliyah would wake to hurl a boulder towards whatever made the sound. Simple, easy, and effective.

“If only,” Taliyah seethed, glaring at the moon above and clawing sand from the shore below, “I. Could. Fall. Asleep!” If she couldn’t fall asleep, if her heartbeat and breath remained at their usual pace, perhaps a skilled predator would realize her ruse and steer clear.

Then another one of her herd would die.

Taliyah took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and reclined back onto the soft earth. Slowly, she opened her eyes and continued to stare at the moon. Not with anger, but with patience. She would do all she could, and if she couldn’t fall asleep, then she would make up for it by being calmer, more relaxed than she had ever been before.

Perhaps she was rewarded with her efforts, or perhaps they had never mattered in the first place. When the light, soft hues of dawn painted over the night’s black and starry sky, and Taliyah’s eyelids were finally drooping closed, a plate snapped.

Taliyah flinched, eyes wide open and weariness instantly dissolved. Unsure of the plate’s exact location, she forced herself to stay absolutely still. Her eyes, though forced closed, flicked back and forth beneath their lids with urgency. “ _Stay calm_ ,” she coached. “ _Wait for another plate, then go_.”

Thankfully, she didn’t have to wait long. The intruder waited a few more moments, perhaps considering its attack, then charged. In an instant, six slates were broken as it dashed towards the seemingly defenseless human.

But Taliyah was far from defenseless. She sprung to her feet in a single fluid motion, focusing all her efforts, every bit of concentration into her ability. Below her, about two meters down, a boulder several times her size rested among the soft earth. Taliyah forced it to the surface until it burst from the ground beneath her feet, showering the shore in dirt and lifting her into the air.

Then, without waiting for a moment, she vaulted off the massive stone and sent it hurling in the opposite direction, toward the breaking plates.

She expected it to end quickly, for the boulder to go hurtling through the creature and crashing into the trees beyond, only stopping when it collided with the surrounding cliff face.

That was not what happened.

In the time it took for Taliyah to fall, those fractions of a second, she saw something terrifying. The boulder, the massive thing that demanded all of her focus to hurl, stopped.

 To her horror, as the behemoth passed over the earthen shore and impacted where she knew the predator to be, a deafening boom thundered through the oasis. A shockwave wracked the trees, rattled the foliage, and Taliyah could only watch as cracks flashed through the boulder, then explode outward.

Rubble rained down across the shore, huge chunks splashed into the pool and crashed through the trees. The instant her feet touched the ground, Taliyah raised a wall between herself and the boulder. She watched in shock as debris landed around her, smashing into the wall and burying itself in the surrounding earth. “ _What is this?_ ”

Suddenly, something crashed through the wall, tackling into Taliyah and sending her screaming and tumbling across the shore. “ _What is happening_?”

She skidded to a stop, then twisted and sprung back to her feet. Her robes were torn in several places, and her jewelry was hanging broken from her shoulders. She quickly unfastened the strap holding the earthen plates to her shoulders, then tossed the whole thing aside, never once looking away from the opponent before her.

She could see something moving, obscured by the remains of the broken wall as it crumbled to dust. She could see its form, just barely. I was a small creature, not even coming up to her waist as it stood on its hind legs, and dark enough that it blended in with the stone.

But she was sure it was staring her down.

Placing a hand to the earth, she summoned more rocks from beneath the surface, preparing for a fight as they erupted from the ground and levitated beside her. “ _What is that?_ ” she panicked. “ _Too small for a Ralsiji or Brakern. An Outerbeast? Dear Lord no, Xer’Sai? How is it so strong?_ ”

She tensed, observing as the creature approached, the plates beneath breaking with a crunch one after another. Her focus grew sharp, reaching a fever pitch as the beast emerged from the dust.

“Wow, I didn’t know you filthy _traders_ could do that. Still gonna die though,” exclaimed the creature.

Taliyah froze.

Before her was not the savage beast she had envisioned, but something else entirely. Something she had never seen before, though she had witnessed nearly every species Shurima had to offer. Something that spoke with the same masculine tone as the older boys in her caravan. Something fascinating.

Something…cute.

It was a small creature, anthropomorphic in nature yet covered in thick, bushy brown fur, yet still thin enough to make out a highly muscled frame covered only with a tattered pair of baggy brown pants. Though still paw-like, the creature’s hands and feet clearly featured four dexterous finders and three toes, the former of which were curled into fists as it prowled closer. And its face, though strewn with anger, was the most adorable thing Taliyah had ever seen. A small, catlike nose framed with black piercings from its forehead to its chin. Large, fluffy ears that twitched with every cracking plate. Perfectly round, yellow eyes brimmed with intelligence in the morning light.

“Wait,” Taliyah pleaded, allowing her stones to drop beside her, hands held aloft in surrender. “There’s been a misunderstanding.”

The creature grinned with sharp, black teeth, popping its neck and fingers as he prowled closer. “What? Are you scared? Good,” he dashed, closing the gap between the two in an instant, “I’m not.”

Taliyah acted on reflex, dashing back and flinging the fallen rocks at her opponent. He ducked beneath one, punched another hard enough to shatter it into rubble, never breaking his grin. “You know, I was starting to get bored.” He dodged another rock, one of the dozens Taliyah had brought up in her desperation. “And here you come, a nice, fresh _trader_ I must’ve missed.”

She scrambled aboard a smaller boulder, quickly raising herself high into the air. “What are you talking about?” she screamed over the side. “Traitor? Who betrayed you?”

The creature didn’t respond. Instead, it caught sight of a floating rock nearby. He leaped, clutching the rock midair and, in a fluid motion, hurled it at Taliyah. It flew short, yet strong, penetrating deep into her boulder. Her mount crumbled, leaving its passenger to fall into the pool below.

Taliyah took a breath before impact, then plummeted far below the surface, opening her eyes to the stinging water when she felt her feet touch the bottom. Her clothes billowed around her, swaying with motion as she grabbed at a sizeable stone to anchor herself to the sandy bed.

“ _Think_ ,” she ordered herself. “ _The predator is sentient; you can’t kill it. He thinks you’re someone else. You need to make him listen._ ” She looked to the surface, her lungs, trained by innumerable sandstorms, only burned slightly with the lack of air. Though the water was muddied by her crash, she could still see the creature’s form at the surface, and, given her distinct crimson robes, it could probably see her. Clearly, it was waiting for her to run out of air, then finish her off once she broke the surface.

“ _How do you stop someone and get them to listen?_ ” She paused, thinking back to a moment a few days before. One of the caravan mothers, sick with the feuding between her two sons, had lured both into a single tent and tied the only exit shut, promising only to let them out when they came to an agreement. Though the mother, and the caravan for that matter, had long given up hope once their arguing reached an ungodly decibel, at least for a little while, the boys had talked.

So that was the key: immobilization.

And she had a plan. Carefully, slow enough not to arouse suspicion, she compressed the soft earth beneath the creature, dense enough to make a solid surface beneath a thin layer of soft sand. She waited, watching for an unusual movement from the figure that would indicate that he noticed.

He didn’t move.

Smiling, she continued, heaving the rock she clutched onto her lap then reaching further down into the earth for as much sand, silt, and clay as she could find, amassing it until she had enough to fill the pool. At this point, her lungs were feeling strained. Though she had been in several sandstorms where the air was filled with unbreathable debris, she had always been able to sneak short breaths into her sleeve. She couldn’t take this much longer, and, if she waited, the creature might move.

Her lungs spasmed, releasing a vital breath to the surface. “ _Now!_ ” Taliyah screamed at herself. She forced the rock she was clutching straight up and out of the water, high into the air. The creature, who was winding up with another rock to deal the death-blow, shouted as Taliyah forced the earth beneath his feet to vault high into the air. He fell with a splash into the pool’s center.

Taliyah, clutching her stone above the pool, waited for the moment when the creature broke the surface, eyes wide as he gasped for breath. She released every bit of the accumulated sand, silt, and stone into the pool, then swirled it into a whirlpool around the creature, painfully careful to keep his head above water. His arms, frantically reaching something to latch onto, were soon pinned to his side, unable to move in the thick concoction Taliyah had created.

When Taliyah descended to the shore, the once crystal clear pool she had fallen into was replaced by a thick, artificial quicksand pit, featuring a struggling, swearing creature in the center buried to his neck. “You filthy _trader_!” he snarled, the surrounding quicksand bulging with the force he exerted. “Fight fair!”

Taliyah, taking a moment to breathe deeply and relieve her burning lungs, levitated a path of rocks over the quicksand. She hopped from rock to rock until she reached the center, then took a seat on a final, larger shard. She allowed the smaller rocks to fall into the quicksand with a _plunk_. “Ok,” She began, “now talk with me.”

The creature snarled, bearing each and every one of his sharp, obsidian teeth. Even though he was restrained by quicksand, which no one could escape with brute force alone, Taliyah couldn’t help but shrink back.  “Let me out now, and we’ll settle this one-on-one,” he glared.

“Why would I do that?” Taliyah waved a hand. “I don’t want to fight; I just want answers. First, who betrayed you?”

The creature scoffed, ignoring her. “Thought I killed the lot of you fucking _traders_ , yet here you are. Another testament to my failure.”

Taliyah took a moment to decipher his words. With the sole exception of the word ‘ _trader_ ’ spoken in a common tongue, the little creature used an ancient, guttural Central Shuriman dialect few in the desert practiced anymore, and even fewer as a first language. Had Taliyah not conversed with scores of travelers in her lifetime, a perk of her constantly mobile lifestyle, his threatening rambles would be no different than snarls and growls.

“ _Wait_ ,” she thought. “ _Can he not understand me? Is that the problem?_ ”

“Okay, so wait,” she tried again, the throaty dialect odd on her tongue and ticklish in her throat.  “Are you saying _traitor_ with a ‘T,’ or _trader_ with a ‘D’?”

He struggled beneath the quicksand, his large, brown ears swaying back and forth as he shifted. Then he paused, the sand sinking back into place. An evil smirk formed, perhaps realizing he could understand his captor. “Clever fucker,” he remarked. “‘D,’ as in, ‘I’m going to _decapitate_ you.’”

“But I’m not a trader,” she argued, leaning towards the creature. “I’m a shepherd.”

He stared at her, one brow arched higher than the other, one ear perked, an expression that clearly said ‘Are you an idiot?’

“You know, a shepherd. Right?” Nothing. “I raise sheep.” Still nothing. “Like, little mammals with curly fur.” He clearly had no idea what she was talking about. “Like the song, ‘baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool?’ Right?” He returned to struggling in the sand. “You killed one of them just a day ago.”

“Look, lady,” he began, wiggling a finger free from the pit. “I kill a lot of things, and I really don’t care if your sheep… thing was one of them. All I know is that you’re a trader and you’ve gotta die.”

“But that’s just it,” Taliyah reburied the finger to the creature’s displeasure, “I’m not a trader, I’m a shepherd. How did you come across the thought that I’m a trader?”

“Are you kidding? It’s obvious. You got that thin, useless skin without fur or scales or anything. Blunt, stubby, useless teeth. Five fingers. A nose that doesn’t dry out if you don’t lick it. How are you not a trader?”

Taliyah screamed her frustration into her dirtied, sopping sleeve. “How does that make any sense? None of those things make me a trader; all humans have them.”

The creature stopped. “What’s a human?”

Taliyah paused, glancing up from her sleeve to the creature’s befuddled expression. “Wait, you don’t know what a human is?”

“Of course, I do,” the creature rolled his eyes, “I just ask questions to hear myself talk.” He locked gazes with her, “I’m serious. The _fuck_ is a human?”

“Well, first, what’s a trader to you?”

“All of you!” the creature exploded. “All of you long-legged, thin-skinned, sticky-fingered, bastards are traders! I look at you and think ‘Fuck, it’s a trader.’ I look over there and think ‘That’s a fucking tree.’ And then I look back and think ‘Fucking dammit! The fucking trader is still alive!’”

The hidden clues formed an answer. “Okay, I think I see the issue here. So correct me if I’m wrong, but the ones you met earlier, the ones who ‘betrayed you,’ called themselves traders, right?”

He scowled, the piercing on his face clicked as they bunched together, but the creature did not object.

“Were these ‘traders’ the only people you ever met who look like me?”

He looked away and spat into the sand. “Fortunately.”

“So I’m starting to see where you’re confused,” Taliyah explained. “A ‘ _trader_ ’ is just an individual who buys goods, goes somewhere else, and sells them for money or other goods. It’s a job, in other words, what a person does to obtain the resources to survive.”

The creature glared. “You’re not fucking with me, are you?”

“If I am lying, may the earth open and swallow me now.” When the earth failed to do so, she continued, “A _human_ is the species I belong to, which is a name for creatures with similar features. Same as you – you belong to a group with similar physical–”

“Yordle,” he interrupted. “I’ma yordle.”

“Oh,” she said, “so you are. But the point being, you only ever saw one group of humans, they called themselves traders, and they wronged you. I am a human, I look _similar_ to the ones who called themselves traders, and you assumed I was one of the traders who did you harm. However, I arrived here last evening, work as a shepherd, and never saw one of your kind before in my life.” she concluded. “Is any part of this unclear?”

The creature – the _yordle_ – scrunched his nose, looking at the quicksand, to Taliyah, then back to the sand. He chewed his lip, the edge of a sharp, black fang just barely peeking out. Then he sighed, “Yea, I get it. I messed up. Happy?”

“Good,” Taliyah breathed out her anxiety, holding both hands over her calming heart. “Thank goodness we have that sorted out.” But then she sternly looked at him again, “So no more killing, right? If I let you out, you won’t attack me?”

The yordle tisked. “I dunno, you threw a boulder at me first. You kinda started it.”

Taliyah reared back, smacking her palm to her forehead, “Oh goodness, you’re completely right! I am so very sorry.” She reached forward, leaning off her rock, and looked deep into his eyes as she squished both fluffy cheeks between her hands. “Could you ever find it in your heart to forgive me?”

He tensed at the contact, eyes darting to an offending hand, then to Taliyah, then to the other hand, and back to Taliyah. He sighed, dropping the tension in his shoulders, “Whatever. I was coming to kill you anyway. It’s all even in the end.”

Taliyah, though faced with the killer of her sheep, relaxed. She had expected the worst-case scenario – a savage, beastly killer that would mindlessly prey on her flock for months to come. Instead, she found a confused little fuzz-ball that spoke no differently than the immature young men of her caravan — a yordle who, as her hands cupped his cheeks, shook his head to dislodge them.

She ruffled the fur between his ears, chuckling as they swayed with the motion. “See? We could have talked this through from the beginning.”

He ducked aside, batting away the hand with a massive ear. “Whatever, lady,” He dismissed. “Can you get me out?”

“Right, of course,” Taliyah focused on the ruble on the shore, selecting a stone too small for herself, but just large enough of a perch for the yordle. Lifting it up, she pulled it closer until it was right behind his head while he craned his neck to see what was going on. It was hard to force it through the dense soup of the quicksand, but she managed to position it right under the yordle’s feet. Slowly, mindful of his body against his dense surroundings, she raised him up and out of the pool.

He stood tall on his rock, which floated centimeters above the pool, glaring while torrents of wet silt flowed off his soaked, furry limbs and out of a likely ruined pair of pants. After a once-over of his filthy fur, perhaps confirming that he looked as much a drowned rat as he felt, he remarked, “Jeez, you stupid traders. You and your bald bodies‘ll never know how much sandy fur itches.”

“Humans,” Taliyah corrected.

“Don’t care, lady,” the yordle insisted, dropping cross-legged on his rock and scraping out as much filth as he could. “Sides, how do ya not know yordles? There aren’t many of us here, but we’re here. My hometown’s full of em’.”

Taliyah, copied his position, shifting her legs between her robes and careful not to let a fold fall into the muck below. “Well, I wouldn’t say I’ve searched for a race I didn’t know existed, but my caravan has traveled Shurima’s desert for generations, and not even our legends speak of your kind.”

The yordle hissed, working on a particularly hard knot on his forearm. “So this place is called Shurima, lady? Nice. That sounds right.”

Something about that statement felt odd to Taliyah. How is it that this yordle, who claimed to have a hometown in the desert filled with his kind, and spoke with a tongue so distinctly Shuriman not know the name of the country he stood on?

The yordle, as he rung out the moisture from the folds of his baggy pants, seemed reasonably coherent despite his tendency to bite first and ask question later. So why is the name of the land beneath his feet new information?

“Are you— _were_ you a slave?” Taliyah whispered.

“Hmm?” He paused his grooming, perking up a large ear. “Speak up trader; the ears are a bit for show.”

“Are you—you know? Were you ever—” Taliyah stumbled over her words. Though slaves were uncommon in today’s age, they still existed in the dark crevices of society. To insinuate that a person was a slave, abused and uneducated to the extent that the name of the country they stood upon was foreign, to be somehow less than a full person, was a horrid insult.

But she had to be sure. “Are you a slave?”

The yordle stared at her, giving her a full view of his yet unseen golden irises, ones that flowed and melded their hue like molten gold was trapped beneath the surface.  Then, he bent over and reached a hand into the quicksand below, cupped a large glob of the mess in his hand, and, before Taliyah could react, flung it straight into her hair.

Taliyah, despite her timid demeanor, bit back a curse at the smirking yordle. “Lord,” she said, using her nails to scrape the sand from her hair, “why would you do that?”

The yordle shrugged, despite his satisfied expression. “I dunno. Your mouth said ‘are you a slave’ but everything else said ‘throw mud at me, please throw mud at me, I’d really wanna know how much it sucks to be covered in mud.’”

…

“So, you know, that’s what I did.”

Taliyah hissed. She was no stranger to having sand in her hair, or everywhere for that matter, but having it encrusted was a pain any girl could attest to.

The yordle returned to his grooming. “I’m not one, by the way. At least, I don’t think I am.”

“What do you mean?” Taliyah asked, angrily scraping chunks of sopping gunk out of her hair and into the pool below. “It’s not a difficult concept. Were you free or were you not?”

“No!” he spat, viciously digging his claws into the rock below.

Taliyah tensed, readying herself for another fight should the yordle decide to make even a single aggressive move. He and the rock he sat on would plummet to the bottom of the quicksand in an instant.

But he didn’t make another aggressive move. He continued to claw at the rock, dropping chunks below to slowly sink into the pit, the tendons of his fingers bulging through the thick fur.

Eventually, he stopped, his fingers still buried to the knuckle in his perch. “It’s not that I don’t understand,” he sighed, “I don’t remember.”

Taliyah did not know how to respond to that, other than a quick, “Oh.”

The situation was unusual, especially since the yordle before her, despite his outburst, continued to appear coherent and aware of himself. He was unlike the few people Taliyah had stumbled upon throughout her life, those reduced to madness and gibberish at the hands of Shurima’s unforgiving landscape. And, given his well-demonstrated strength, she could never imagine him being reduced to floundering.

So then, what happened to him?

“Ok, how much do you remember clearly?” she asked, ignoring her hair and adopting a calm, non-threatening posture. “How far back can you clearly trace your life?”

He shrugged, glaring at the claws he refused to pull out of the rock, watching the cracks ran further along the stone. “I dunno. A year? A year and a half?”

“And is there anything before that? Anything at all?”

He rolled his shoulders, finally pulling his gaze away from his claws to meet Taliyah’s own. He studied her, perhaps trying to gauge if talking would actually be helpful, if she somehow held the answers he wanted.

“I, um,” he began, “I lived with my dad.”

She nodded, urging him to continue.

“He was big…and brown.” He paused, chewing his lip and staring off into space. “There were other yordles, but I can’t remember them as well. It was just me and my dad. Me and him; we were the only family we had.” The corners of his mouth twitched, forming just the faintest smile. “Always goofing off and heating up metal in a big oven, then playing with it ‘til it looked the way we wanted.”

“Oh, so you were blacksmiths,” Taliyah added, readjusting her position for something a little more casual.

“Yea,” his eyes teared up just the faintest bit. “I guess we were.”

They sat in silence. The birds of the oasis, roused by the morning sunlight, chirped out a greeting to the world, to the sun slowly breaking the crest of the surrounding cliff sides. Taliyah breathed in deep, taking in the fresh, clean air she would perhaps never find again in Shurima’s arid climate.

It was pleasant. Peaceful.

“I don’t remember much,” he continued. “I can’t remember what we did…who exactly he was. But the feelings are still there, and I feel like I wanna see him again.”

“Ok then,” Taliyah replied. “I understand the feeling—if my father went missing, finding him would be my first priority. Are there any other clues? Anything else you can remember?”

He ripped a hand out of the rock if only to chew on a claw. Then he shot up. “Oh, oh, oh! The piercings! These ones here,” he pointed to the small, black rods framing his nose, made of a material Taliyah struggled to identify, “he has em’ too. And so does his dad and his dad before him. It’s, like, a family symbol, something special only we did.”

Taliyah leaned in closer. The piercings he referred to, ingrained deep into his flesh yet perhaps removable, appeared like no other material Taliyah had seen before. Their soft, slight transparency suggested crystal, but the harshly reflected sheen of the morning light pointed towards metal. She held out a hand, “Could I inspect one, if you wouldn’t mind?”

He hesitated, but just for a moment. She could understand that—handing a personal treasure to someone you tried to kill and vice versa, all in the same morning, the skepticism on his face was well deserved. But there was something else there, a twisted, heart-wrenching emotion that emerged from the mere mention of a hint towards his missing father.

Desperation.

His gaze hardened, brows furrowed like he had just made an important decision. He turned to bare his back to Taliyah. “Don’t look,” he muttered, raising his hands to his nose. “It’s not pretty.”

From Taliyah’s view, only privy to his muddy back and ducked head, she could see the muscles framed through wet fur as they seemed to exert…far too much effort for a simple piercing. She raised a hand, moving to tap him, to tell him it was alright and they would think of something else when a sickening, wet crack echoed through the oasis.

“Gahhhh!” he screamed, curling tighter into himself and pressing a hand to his face. “Ahhhhh!”

Taliyah leapt to her feet only to teeter haphazardly on her floating perch. Seeing the pained creature writhe on his own rock and inch dangerously close to the edge, she shot both platforms across the quicksand and down onto the safe, stable beach.

The rocks settled on the shore with a solid thump, billowing dry sand into the surrounding air. She hopped off her rock and crouched beside the pained creature, her hands hesitantly held to her sides, unsure of the correct move. “What happened? What’s going on?” she asked. “Weren’t they…I thought… Are they not removable?”

He rolled over on his back, eyes strewn shut in pain while pressing a palm against a bleeding patch on his nose. In the other hand, the one he jutted out to Taliyah and slowly twitched open was a piercing resting among a tiny pool of blood. “It is,” he hissed. “Took one out before. Stick it in then flesh heals around it. Locks it in.”

“That’s not how it works!” Taliyah panicked. “That’s not how piercings work!”

He scoffed through the pain. “For you stupid traders, lady. Guess yordles are just better.” He shook his fist, then opened it again to the piercing. “Take the stupid thing.”

She huffed, snatching the piercing and setting it aside on a hunk of rubble, then returned to the creature and knelt by his side. “Let me see it,” she demanded.

He cracked open an eye, staring her down even as he lied on his back. A dribble of blood leaked through his fingers. “Why? Just look at it and tell me if I can see my dad again.”

“Because you’re hurt,” she insisted.

“So what?” he shot back. “I get hurt all the time. This isn’t any different. Now look at the stupid thing and tell me where my dad is. Do it before I decide you’re a trader after all.”

There was no convincing him, she realized. Like the older boys back home, when they made a decision, they would stubbornly hold their ground until the grave. It irked her to no end, but, given the strength he’d shown thus far, the yordle currently holding his nose and hissing as if it was broken was likely too headstrong to develop a severe infection.

A moment more of consideration was taken, then she scoured the folds of her own robe for a clean portion. Once she decided on a piece by her hip, she dug her hands beneath the sands for one of the countless broken shards of slate, a poignant reminder of her failed trap, then used a sharpened edge to tear at the seams and cut a rag free.

“Here,” she offered to the yordle a washcloth sized portion of her crimson robes. “For the blood.”

He cracked open another eye, scanning even though she had clearly offered herself as non-threatening. Though he grumbled, he rose to a seated posture as he snatched the rag and pressed it to the wound, dying the cloth an even deeper crimson.

Taliyah smiled. It was progress.

He glanced at that smile, his ears slowly drooped behind his back. His gaze locked to his feet. “Thanks,” he hesitated, “can you, uh, look at the piercing now?”  

Attention returned to the black piercing, nestled in the cracks of a hunk of debris, another reminder of their earlier fight. Gingerly, between her thumb and pointer finger, she picked up the small, cylindrical shard and held it to her eye. As she suspected, it wasn’t similar to any material she had ever seen before.

That was concerning considering her ability gave her a glimpse of every mineral buried beneath the sands. The sun, which had all but escaped the cover of the cliffs, reflected off the stone in a metallic sheen. Yet, as she looked closer, she could just make out the pained face of the yordle through the material. There was no metal she had ever seen that had been transparent. Plus, when tapped against the rock the yordle was seated upon, the telltale metallic _clink_ wasn’t there. But, then again, the _clunk_ of stone or crystal wasn’t there either.

“I…I um,” she hesitated as the yordle perked up. “I…have no idea what this is. I’ve never seen the material.”

The yordle’s ears, which Taliyah learned were the most expressive part of his body, sank back down. “Are you sure?” he asked. “There’s…nothing?”

Taliyah returned to her inspection, flipping the piercing to the opposing circular end.

Her heart leapt. In the piercing, carved into the face that must have been buried in the yordle’s nose, was an engraving delicately crafted into the small surface, one she recognized as the fabled ‘Sun Disk.’ “Do you see this?” she asked, jutting the piercing out to the yordle. “This symbol.” she smiled, enthusiastic. “I know this symbol.”

The yordle squirmed with childish anticipation, flashing his first grin that didn’t preclude violence. “What? What’s it say? Is it magic?”

“Well, no,” said Taliyah “but it is a hint and a colossal one at that.”

Mahotis leaned in, judging the symbol for himself. On the minuscule surface of the black rod, someone had carved an even smaller symbol, invisible among its surroundings if not viewed from a correct angle. However, to him at least, the carving of a sharply edged cross enveloping the sun elicited nothing but confusion. “So what does it tell us?”  

“Well, nothing now,” Taliyah admitted.

His ears drooped again.

“No, no, no, no, it’s okay,” Taliyah cupped his hands, pressing the piercing into his palm. “This symbol was the mark of an ancient civilization, but its descendants still wear it. It’s possible, perhaps, that you were just separated from your group.”

She hesitated for a moment, mulling over her next words. She had an offer, one that could easily backfire, especially when the little yordle before her had slaughtered her sheep, ambushed her at dawn, swore bloodshed against her, and showed her the temperament of a child, but…

But…

“Okay look,” she said shaking his hand, “and you have to take this seriously.”

He said nothing; he only blinked owlishly, golden eyes locked with hers.

“If you behave,” she stressed, “and _only_ if you behave, then, perhaps, it would be okay for you to come back with me to the caravan.”

His gaze didn’t waver.

“And if you travel with us long enough, we’ll likely come across someone with more answers. If we’re lucky, we might even find your group.” She didn’t have to say it, but it was clear what she meant: _We might come across your father._

Still, his gaze did not waver, allowing a full view of his wide-eyed, golden pools that swam in the coming light of day. He sniffed. Then sniffed again; his golden pools turned watery. He trembled, pulling out of Taliyah’s grasp and ducking into a forearm. His frame shuttered, ruffling his filthy fur. “I’m sorry,” he croaked, “for everything.”

He shivered on his stone perch, despite being treated to the growing heat of the day. The way he sat, hiding his face as he wept, doubled over and pitying himself… It was hard to watch.

So Taliyah refused to simply watch.

She sat next to him, close enough that her thigh nearly touched his. Then, throwing caution to the wind, she reached over and, before he could offer a peep of opposition, wrapped her arms around him, uncaring of the filth on her already ruined robes.

Not a word of opposition was spoken when she picked him up, taking his weight upon herself as she held him to her chest, no different than one of the children of her caravan. “There there,” she soothed as he buried himself in her shoulder. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay.”

And, at least for a little while, it was.

When the yordle had finally calmed, he tugged on Taliyah’s sleeve to be let down. Feet firmly planted on the ground, he turned to her, setting the piercing back into his nose, “I have a camp not far from here, on the edge of the oasis overlooking the sand.” He kicked a foot. “I spent a lot of time getting that stuff, had to kill for some of it. Could we…you know…”

Taliyah looked to the sky above. The sun, lazily drifting higher into the sky, hadn’t even come close to the highest point in its arc. “Oh, I suppose so,” then she took note of the yordle’s fur, weighed down and caked with sand, as well as her own heavier head of hair. “But do you suppose we could find another pool and wash?”

The yordle clamped a hand onto his hip, cocking an eyebrow, “Gee, that would be great,” he droned, gesturing at the quicksand pit. “If only there _was_ another one.”

She blushed, this time hiding her face in her hands. “I’m sorry.”

“Whatever,” he said, “doesn’t matter.” Then he turned, walking off into the greenery. “You comin’?”

Taliyah looked up from her stewing and watched the yordle disappear into the thick underbrush of the oasis. Quickly, she set off after him, struggling not to lose his brown, fleeting figure beyond the thick, enveloping hold of plants. “So then,” she called out, hoping a conversation would make him easier to follow, “You told me a little about life before you lost your memories. What about after.”

“Well, I dunno,” came his voice from a little up ahead, further along than she thought. “What’s there to tell?”

Taliyah pushed aside a tree branch only for it to swing back and whip her cheek. She hissed, “Anything really. Start from the beginning.”

“Okay, I guess,” he said, slowing his pace. “When I first woke up, I was underground being crushed by a bolder.” He hopped up and climbed over a fallen log; one Taliyah subsequently tripped over. “I wasn’t thinking too much, started scrambling a lot. Maybe five minutes later, I was crawling out of a crack in the ground, then looked down and saw I’d clawed through solid rock.”

He altered his path a bit, zigzagging through the underbrush. Taliyah noticed, once she was up to her calf in freezing, sloppy mud, that he had been avoiding mud holes. Clearly, his height held advantages.

“So I’m just standing there next to a crack in the ground, desert all around me, and no idea where to go,” he continued. “That’s when I got a tiny sliver of memory, just a gut feeling that said, ‘Home’s this way.’ So I started walking.”

He pushed aside a massive fern. “And walking.”

Ducked under a low hanging branch. “And walking.”

Circled around an imposing ant hill. “And walking, but never found it.”

It was silent for a spell, nothing but the chirps of birds, hissing of insects and breaking of leaves as the pair forged ahead. Then, the yordle decided to continue. “So, by this time, I’d seen some things, ran into a few monsters, killed and ate the meat,” he glanced back, “ever tried Ralsiji meat? It’s bitter.”

Taliyah hopped over the same low hanging branch, “Did you eat the liver or the kidneys? They’re poisonous.”

He shrugged, then scratched at his ear, “Well I ate the whole thing over a few weeks, so I guess it’s not _that_ poisonous.”

Had she not been carefully watching the ground for ant hills, Taliyah would have stared wide-eyed at the small creature. He couldn’t have been more than thirty, thirty-two kilograms, yet he had eaten the kidney _and_ the liver? Fully grown men back in the caravan only nibbled on either as a natural laxative. To eat both, and for such a small creature? How was he alive?

“Then I wandered across the traders,” he spat into the trees. “Tried asking them how far home was. I remembered my dad and asked about him too, but the dumb bastards couldn’t understand a word.”

“Well, to be fair,” Taliyah weaved around a tree, avoiding yet another ant hill, “You use an old tongue. It’s not very common.”

He doubled back, rustling through the foliage until he stood before her, then poked at her knee with a claw. “Well you use it, so how uncommon can it be?”

She laughed, “My caravan is a cultural melting pot. New members come and go all the time. It was just luck I traveled with a family of native-speakers for a time. Even luckier they had a girl my age.”

“Whatever,” he scoffed. “So I go up to them, they start jabbing at my face and stuff when I asked where to find my dad. They patted their chests and said ‘ _trader_ ’ over and over. I did the same and said ‘I’m pissed.’”

In the distance, perhaps a dozen or so meters away, Taliyah could see a break in the trees, followed by the golden desert sands beyond. She urged the yordle to continue.

“This one guy kept poking my piercing, so I took it out just like I did with you n’ showed it to him,” he looked back at her, walking backward as leaves brushed against his backside. “Apparently, they found it more interesting than you did. They all got excited, pointing off in this random direction, then started grabbing at me.”

“Grabbing at you? How?”

“Well,” he rubbed his chin, “This one guy held a sword to my throat, another one got this mean looking grin and started sounding demanding…and so I killed them.”

Taliyah paused. “Wait, how did you kill them?”

The yordle offered nothing other than the word, “Brutally.”

Though she had known that the traders in his story were killed, Taliyah suddenly found herself unable to look at the yordle, instead focusing elsewhere. “Oh…”

He cocked his head, as though confused over what had upset her. “Anyway,” he continued, breaking free of the tree-line and into the clearing of his camp. “I didn’t know what else to do, so I just started walking in the direction they pointed until I reached this place a few weeks ago.” He cocked a thumb behind him, towards the wide expanse of sand. “Came in that way, set up camp here.”

Taliyah, breaking free of the canopy herself, walked into the confines of the yordle’s camp. It was arranged simply, everything set into a semicircle around a crudely dug fire pit. She saw his rations – piles of brightly colored fruit that could be spotted around the oasis, yet still plump and succulent. Oddly, she didn’t see a trace of meat. Raw, smoked, dried, or otherwise.

Beside it, resting in a small pile, was a mound of animal pelts that would put her caravan’s tanner to shame. She saw an enormous range and variety, from the greyish hide of the docile Mwatis, the pitch-black fur of an Outerbeast, the scaly yellow flank of a Sandswimmer, and finally, perhaps to be used as a sack for the entirety of his supplies, was the massive, de-plated skin of the colossal Dormun.

And still, there were many more. Far more than one person of average strength could hope to carry.

The yordle, who now stood beside her, noticed her ogling. “Yea, I probably don’t need to keep all of those,” he admitted. “But I remember my dad said never to waste food. I, um, assumed that would apply to the useful parts too.”

And finally, in a small pile set aside from the others, was a small collection of clothes, bottles, boxes, and other wares.

She didn’t need an explanation of where they came from.

The yordle rolled back and forth on his heels, glancing up at his new companion. “Welp,” he clapped his hands, “I’ll pack all this up, and we can get going.”

Taliyah stood in place as the yordle approached the pelts and then tried to tug the massive Dormun skin free of the pile. The pelts atop the Dormun fell from the stack, landing on the solid, yet dry and sandy ground below. “Do you, perhaps, need a little help?”

The yordle waved her off, “Don’t worry about it. Find something to play. I’ll be all packed up in a bit.”

Taliyah looked at the yordle, who had freed the massive skin, then back out to the vast expanse of desert. It seemed like a challenging stretch, just sand dunes reaching out into the horizon, shifting in the winds with fluid movement that betrayed that fact that there was no solid footing to be found. It was the kind of terrain that would necessitate extreme caution in her caravan, including attaching flat skis in the place of wheels of their carts, lest the entire structure sink below the surface.

And the yordle had traversed it with no issue.

Then, she saw a speck in the distance — a small, unassuming fragment of something brown in the sea of yellow. She focused in on it, on the way it seemed to be buried and uncovered in the shifting sands. Though small, perhaps only as tall as a camel if she had her distance about her, it remained distinct.

“Um, excuse me,” she asked, interrupting the yordle as he struggled to lay the skin flat, preparing to wrap it around his supplies. “That figure, the one about five degrees north-northeast and a few kilometers out. Do you know what that is? Perhaps a structure or a ruin?”

The yordle tensed, his claws buried into the canvas. “I, uh… I don’t… there’s nothing out there.”

Taliyah nodded, yet couldn’t help but notice the unnaturalness of the figure. If it was a rock, a single spire, it was the only one as far as the eye could see. Though Taliyah didn’t know about the rest of the world, it was somewhat rare for a rock _that_ imposing to stand alone among the sand. Erosion should have long worn the spire into nothing. Yet it also didn’t have the coloration of the local geography. The cliffs around her, framing the oasis, had a rusty red coloration, possibly due to a mixture of iron-oxide. However, the figure out there, as she could hardly make out, had a brown-grey color to it.

How curious.

“I’m going to check it out,” Taliyah declared. It was a golden rule her father taught her: in Shurima, investigate anything odd, lest it makes its mind to investigate you.

Before the yordle could stop her, as he abandoned the skin and reached out toward the girl, she had already willed the ground beneath her to break free of the earth, flying dozens of meters into the air with Taliyah as its passenger. Sand and stone and dirt fell freely below her perch, clacking against the sides of the crater she had created, before soaring off into the desert towards the mysterious structure.

The wind howled in Taliyah’s ears, a whistling song as she soared off across the sand, which was now nothing but a yellow blur below her. She crouched low against the wall of air, not one to allow herself to fall from her perch.

Even as her destination grew closer, the speck forming into a large dot, then a distinct shape, she could feel her heart hammer against her chest, excited to ride freely again, unburdened by the meticulous, slow pace of tracking.

But the excitement soon came to an end. She arrived at her destination, now only the barest hint of tan visible in the shifting desert. She leapt from her perch, leaving it to crash into the endless sands while she slid down the slope of a dune, coming to rest before a featureless patch of sand. The final remains of the object had been buried in mere moments.

Couldn’t have that, now could we?

Reaching deep within herself, sinking her fingers into that core of magic she had been blessed from birth with, she tapped into it. Like an act of nature, like a typhoon had erupted in the middle of the desert, she forced it out.

If the desert was an ocean of sand, Taliyah had just summoned a tsunami. The sand around her, each and every individual grain, was forced away. It was though an invisible, circular wall had emerged from her body, pushing against the desert and churning it like a real sea. Her boulder, the one that laid abandoned in the dunes, was consumed by the tidal wave, all moved by the will of one girl. Even as far as the oasis, she was sure, the yordle must have felt the rumbles of an earthquake.

She fell several meters, landing on sand perhaps buried for centuries, and, through her exhaustion, was faced with her objective.

A cart.

A decrepit, crumbling cart stood before her, built in an old, traditional style yet weathered by the sands. The desert, though dangerous, had a way of preserving beauty. Though crumbling, the wooden arches that once support the torn, tattered bonnet still stood proud, like the bones of an ancient creature. These were supported by the boards forming the wagon bed that, though a few were broken and lopsided, stood firm against the test of time. The wheels, however, were uselessly shattered. They sat crumbled beside the cart, shards of petrified wood sticking from the ground at odd angles, perhaps crushed by the weight of the sand.

She checked the tongue, the outreaching length of wood that would have served to harness a camel or other desert dwelling creature to the hefty weight. While the structure was intact, the leather straps, now nothing more than wrinkled, shriveled remains of animal skins, were clearly deliberately cut.

It was sad, tragic even, but Taliyah had seen it before. A traveler, perhaps even a family, had ventured into the desert ill-equipped and unprepared only to be buried under a mountain of sand. Or perhaps even an experienced explorer made a miscalculation on how many rations to pack, dried out and starved under the desert heat, but not before cutting their camels loose and offering them a chance to survive.

In the end, all that was left was mummification beneath the sand.

Taliyah inspected the cart, particularly the darkened symbol adorning the side. In golden paint, worn and chipped after facing the onslaught of the sand, was the Sun Disk, betraying the cart’s age of several thousand years. Though the descendants wore the symbol of the ancient era, they always kept it to clothing and accessories; there was no point to waste the paint on a cart that, given the threats lurking in the sand, was best not to get attached to.

It was different when the civilization was at the height of its power. When the symbol of the almighty kingdom known to ward away bandits and, under the dominion of the emperor, the land’s savage beasts.

The crimson-clad shepherd didn’t so much as bat an eye. The desert, though having a way to preserve beauty, never seemed to let one forget. This was far from the only piece of memorabilia Taliyah had seen from the ancient age, ranging from ruins to monuments to, coincidently, other carts. All beautiful, but all, ultimately, grave-markers.

The standard was clear, taught to her by her father. Search the site of the dead, learn as much as you could to preserve their memory, collect anything useful, and, if they were still there, bury the bodies alongside their valuables.

She looked at the decrepit cart, then over her shoulder to the oasis, now just a line of green against a sheer wall of rock. There was a little guy there, waiting for her to lead the way to his father.

But this would be quick.

When her foot landed on the lip of the bed, it groaned its dissatisfaction, yet held sturdy. She balled up her robes in either hand, then hoisted herself over the edge and into the cart. A typical assortment lie within: small barrels, likely for rations; a decent sized pile of furs, perhaps for warmth, probably for sale; a dried up mound of hay for the camels; and, finally, maps scattered on and across everything else. There were maps of every edge of Shurima, from the seas to the north and south, to Targon’s border in the west, and to the unexplored, unclaimed jungles of the east.

The maps were high quality, depicting key features that, even thousands of years later, still resided within Shurima. She knew – she had seen them. They were not perfect, Shurima’s shifting topography never allowed complete accuracy, but it was clear that whoever traveled within the cart was either a highly skilled mapmaker, or went to extreme lengths to know where they were going.

But what drew more attention than the masterful depiction of the desert, one that was still more decipherable than the ancient, yellowed parchment, was the thick, angry ‘x’ marks slashed across the maps. Entire regions were obstructed under black ink. Specific sites – ruins, temples, landmarks – were wiped out one after the other.

Taliyah’s mind jumped to a treasure hunter who searched for a specific something that couldn’t be found in the places marked with an ‘x.’ An explorer her caravan came across once, a blond-haired, fair-skinned boy a few years her senior, had the same habit of crossing out ruins he had looted on his own homemade maps.

She gathered the maps, one after the other, and carefully folded them into small squares. They would do the deceased no good. But, to one of the many travelers her group came upon stumbling through the sand, perhaps they could lead them out of the harsh landscape.

All of the maps were collected and folded except one. The final map was partially tucked beneath a book, one bound in such shriveled, contracted leather that Taliyah could make out several lines of writing on the first page, though worn and faded with time. She picked it up, slipped out, folded, and pocketed the map alongside the others, then turned her attention back to the book.

It was a journal, that much she could tell. Flipping through the pages, the noticed the dates written in the top right corners every so often, expressed in the same odd notation of the ancient civilization. Their years contained only four months. New days began not when the sun set, but when it hit its highest point in the sky. And the years counted down instead of up.

Truth be told, their system not only confused her, but was known to frustrate archeologists who, despite access to hundreds of legible scriptures, could only confirm that the civilization fell between five and six-thousand years ago.

Her attention turned to the text, written in the official language of the ancient kingdom. Of course, it was the same spoken by the family that traveled with her caravan, along with her companion back at the oasis.

She had learned the written form in the days spent traveling alongside the native speakers, but it was far from mastered. If she went slowly, word by word with diligence, picking between extremely faded characters, then she could form the general message. Not every word, just the bulk of what was meant to be conveyed.

Taliyah flipped through the pages, searching for the last one. She could sate her curiosity now with the final thoughts of the deceased, then decode the rest in the comfort of her own tent once the yordle was acquainted with her caravan. Perhaps the yordle was literate and could read it to her.

She found it three pages from the end, the latest date marked in the top left above three paragraphs.

**_I……..aged. However many years……passed…..I’ve seen your face……bright in the glow of the….…………..excitement over …………….……….My son, I am sorry. So very, truly sorry I was………to…….that face…..for you to……mine. Though I’ve traveled far, I…..…..find a trace of you. In the wake of the kingdom’s………..I feared you had been killed. Perhaps you had. Perhaps I am simply a stubborn…..fool who……..…..accept reality. But when I……….you………out there, scared of the world I’ve yet to prepare you for, I……….remain idle._ **

**_And yet here I sit, dying…by the desert….…..but by the betrayal of my……….Would you recognize me if I found you? Would you……..the…..shriveled me as the man who carried you on his back when you were young? Guided your……as you hammered away…………….Who waved you off the night you disappeared? I……you would. I always…...Perhaps the next time I……….my eyes, I’ll……….to you….. joined…..last in the afterlife._ **

**_But I……...I don’t want to………………. you. I….more than anything else, despite the horrible things that might……..happened to you, that you managed to live. I…..you’ve lived a….full life…….surrounded..........that make you just as……as you made me. I………….every fiber of my being I ……that I will……..to look…….you soon, as…….as you deserve to be._ **

**_Mahotis, my only child, I…………………………._ **

Taliyah flipped a page forward, just in case. Nothing but a blank canvas, never to be touched by the journal’s owner. She sighed, then closed the book and tucked it away alongside the maps. She supposed, in a way, the poor soul _was_ a treasure hunter. Even though the unnamed man was long deceased, her chest ached with pity. If his last words were any indicator, alongside the extent of his travels, he had searched for his child for years, likely decades, yet found nothing.

Hands clasped, head bowed, she offered a prayer to the deceased, taking solace in the fact that he was surely reunited with his son in the afterlife now.

She finished her prayer, then set about searching for the body. After hopping off the wagon and onto the sand below, she scanned her surroundings for a snip of clothing, or a flash of mummified skin, or, if scavengers were able to claim the body before the sands, a chunk of bone.

But there wasn’t a trace to be found. She shifted the sands, digging around the cart and shoveling the earth away as the sun crept higher into the sky. And yet, the body continued to elude her. What she had written off as a quick chore had morphed into a grueling task. When the blazing sphere had reached its highest point, the high arc of midday, there was no choice but to accept defeat.

Taliyah cursed at her luck, returning to scavenge from the cart. Perhaps, once she returned home, she could sway the caravan to adjust its course to pass by the oasis. There were elders far more experienced than she, ones who would have far better luck locating a body even without the ability to shift the very earth.

She hopped back into the cart, feeling it shift with her weight. The barrels, she noted, were well made in their time, but the wood had dried and shrunk until the metal hoops hung loose. A quick glance inside revealed that the rations, like the hay, were no better than dust. Moving her attention to the mound of furs, she grabbed the topmost pelt and pulled back.

Her stomach, her heart, everything dropped.

In the blazing Shuriman sun, Taliyah felt cold.

She hadn’t searched the cart’s interior for a body, much less the small mound of furs that couldn’t hope to conceal an entire corpse. Yet here it was, the body she had searched for.

But it wasn’t human.

It was a small creature, anthropomorphic in nature yet covered in thin, wispy brown fur on skin that held tight to the bones, concealed with a single, silken robe. Though still paw-like, the creature’s hands and feet clearly featured four dexterous fingers and three toes, the former of which were crossed over its chest. And its face, though its skin held tight to its skull, seemed peaceful.

It was a yordle.

And on its face, framing the nose and loose in their sockets, were black, cylindrical piercings.

She had seen those piercings before, placed the exact same way on a yordle packing its bags in an oasis behind her, waiting for her to take him to—

_…To his father._

Taliyah fell to her knees.

“ _The yordle had said only his family had the piercings, it was a family legacy,_ ” Taliyah grabbed at her hair as she tried to make sense of it all. “ _This man must be related, but that doesn’t mean he is the father we’re searching for. Right, families can be large, and there could have been a brother or uncle—_ ”

“ _That’s right_ ,” Taliyah hissed to herself. “ _He remembered they were the only remaining members of the family. His father couldn’t have had any other children—the last line of his journal had said ‘only child.’ The family couldn’t have continued; the only heir had gone missing never to be seen again. There was no one left to keep the piercing tradition_.”

Taliyah looked at the corpse before her, its fur fluttering softly in the desert breeze, perhaps for the first time in millennia. A weight settled on her shoulders, the gravity of the situation dawning on her. The father her yordle companion spoke of, and the one before her, the one who had spent his life searching for his son, were one in the same.

Gradually, as she knelt there, all the clues in her mind slowly formed a complete picture, every hint gathered from the instant she had crossed paths with the yordle residing in the oasis. Hints that, when looked at as a whole, revealed that the yordle she had met wasn’t of this time

He wasn’t a descendant of the ancient civilization; he was a member. There was never any language acquisition beyond his single, archaic dialect. Had he lived back then, when the tongue was universal across the country, there was no need for it.

Before, when they spoke above the quicksand, the yordle had taunted her for not knowing any other members of his species, flaunting their numbers in his hometown. But Taliyah was right; there were no yordles in the desert. At least, not today. Millennia ago, however, an entire town of the creatures could have flourished, yet disappear to the ravages of time alongside the crumbling empire. But, had he lived then, there was no reason why he couldn’t have said that.

Shurima’s landscape was always changing. Always shifting. He had referred to his home as a ‘hometown,’ a fixed location. Perhaps not in the span of a few days, but in years, decades even, an entire stretch of residents could be concealed under a thin layer of sand. Millennia? He could have walked ten meters over the roof of his former home and never known.

Finally, the reason why the yordle was here, why he was camping in the oasis. Perhaps she was wrong in that the cart had been completely buried for centuries. Perhaps the traders the yordle had spoken of had been here before her, before himself. Perhaps they had seen the corpse, the piercings in its nose, and pointed the yordle in this direction. Perhaps that wasn’t the case and it was all dumb luck, but that didn’t change the reality of the matter.

The yordle in the oasis, the one she had met just this morning, was born thousands of years ago. She had no idea how this was the case, but the evidence around her confirmed it.

The yordle in the oasis, the one desperately searching for his father, was camped mere kilometers from his father’s corpse.

How would he react?

She pictured anger, confusion, aggression, and violence. Thinking back to earlier in the day, when he had come after her with the intent to kill, who was to say that wouldn’t happen again? For a moment, just a brief moment, she considered opening a massive hole beneath the cart and sending it deep within the earth never to be seen again.

But she couldn’t.

Even in the security of her caravan, people died. Whether it be from a predator, a poison, a failed excursion, or just time, death was no stranger, more like a shadow dancing in tune with every step.

But they embraced it.

They did not shy away from reality but faced it. They did not delude themselves with false hopes, but accepted reality and moved forward. Perhaps with a limp to their step, but they always walked forward through the desert and through life.

And if she were to return home today to her father having died, then damn it she would want to know.

So she carefully, with respect befitting the dead, wrapped the body in all the carts furs, then lifted and set the bundle on the sands beside the cart. She offered another prayer, then forced the sand below to accept him, watching as the bundle slowly sank beneath the surface until nothing remained.

It wasn’t enough.

She focused on the earth below, not the sand on which she stood, but on the bedrock deep beneath the dunes. Clenching her fist, the took hold of a spire of rock, then forced it up through the sand, higher and higher until it exploded through the surface, showering the cart and herself in sand.

The spire was tall, at least twice as tall as the cart, and its grey color stood in contrast to the yellow hue of the desert. Taliyah took great care to balance it, making sure it had support beneath the surface as a proper gravestone should.

Taliyah took one last look, at the cart and the grave beside it. She wiped her tears on her tattered sleeve, then turned and began her walk back to the oasis. There was no need to summon a rock – she needed the time to figure out what to say.

The sun was long past its peak when she arrived, hovering over the western horizon and threatening the return of darkness. Taliyah was tired, her throat dry and stomach empty. When the ground beneath her feet became solid again, she took a short detour into the trees to knock down and devour a juicy, rich crimson fruit. Her throat wet, able to speak without discomfort, she went over what she would say to the yordle – once, twice, and thrice – then trekked back to his camp.

He was sitting where she had left him, knees tucked against his chest and encircled by his arms. Behind him lay a massive sack, far larger than either of them. It was the Dormun skin wrapped around his supplies and tied closed with a rope.

He stared blankly out at the desert, its yellow sands adopting an orange hue in the evening light. Other than a twitch of his ear, he didn’t respond to her approach. She sat beside him, carefully shifting her tattered, ruined robes so she could hug her own knees.

“My friend, I—”

“There’s not a cart out there,” the yordle interrupted, a tight grip locked on his pants. “I know what you thought you saw, but it wasn’t really there. It’s just the desert playing tricks.”

The fact he said _cart_ was not lost to her. “How do you know what I saw was a cart? Before I left, you said there wasn’t anything out there.”

His grip tightened, his claws shredded through the pants, perhaps into the flesh beneath, then relaxed. “Whatever. Doesn’t matter,” he stood up, then turned and lifted the massive sack, dozens of times his weight, high above his head. “Let’s just get going.”

“No,” Taliyah demanded, moving to block his path. “The cart, you’ve seen it before, haven’t you? Have you looked inside?”

The yordle paused, frozen in his step. “No,” he said. “And even if I had, so what? It’s just an old cart in the desert, nothing special about it.” And then his movement resumed, aimed back into the foliage towards the entrance Taliyah had first passed through.

It took but a moment for the dots to collect in Taliyah’s mind. She stepped toward him. “You saw him didn’t you,” she declared. “You saw the body.”

The yordle tossed the hulking sack aside, crashing into the dirt. He turned and marched back, jabbing a claw at her face. “I didn’t see anything, ya stupid trader. There ain’t nothing out there, just sand and junk and an empty cart.”

“So there is a cart now?” she defended. “You just said there was nothing there.”

“There _is_ nothing!” The yordle clenched his fist, leering up to shout in her face. “Just a bunch of stupid shit that doesn’t matter! Why can’t you get that?”

“You did see the cart,” she dismissed, leaving him seething. “You looked inside, that’s why you’re acting like this. You saw the body.”

“Stop it!” the yordle raged, yanking at his ears. “Stop saying stupid shit. It’s a fake; you’re lying to me.” He reached out, grabbed Taliyah’s robes and yanked her closer with his ungodly strength. “You’re wasting time; we need to go find my dad.”

“I have found your father, _you_ have found your father,” Taliyah argued, pointing out to the grey spire jutting up from the sands. “He is right there.”

“No, no, no, no, no! That’s stupid; it’s so fucking stupid! He wouldn’t die like that,” his golden eyes glowed like a fire had lit behind the iris. “My dad isn’t fucking weak, there’s no way he’d die with all the resources here so close.”

Taliyah clasped his shoulders. He wriggled to dislodge them, but she held firm. “Your father died thousands of years ago. The oasis wasn’t here back then.” She pulled the journal from her robes, thrusting it in his face. “It says right here in the journal, on the last page. He died of old age.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” the yordle argued, batting aside her arms. “Thousands of years ago? That’s bullshit! If he was alive thousands of years ago, then how the hell am I here now, huh? How am I alive right now?”

“I don’t know,” Taliyah confessed. “But impossible things happen all the time. Perhaps you fell into the void where times moves quickly, or perhaps you came across Zilean or an artifact of Zhonya. Anything could have happened.”

 He growled at her, literally growled. Like a predator, like the brutal, sheep murdering monster she had believed him to be. Like the dangerous creature she had first seen at the pool in the light of dawn. “And so what? So what if the corpse out there looks like me? There’s no proof it’s my dad.”

Taliyah looked across the horizon to the grave, to the corpse buried in sand and furs. “It’s the piercings,” she muttered. “You said only your family had them. They were your symbol.”

The creature ground his obsidian teeth, his fists clenching and unclenching with a desire to tear. “How the fuck is that anything? You think my memories can be trusted? I have amnesia for fuck's sake! There’s nothing! There’s fucking nothing to prove that’s my dad, so shut up and let’s. Fucking. Go!”

But there was something, Taliyah knew. She stared at the yordle, fuming before her like a savage, like he wanted nothing more than to kill her, to paint her blood across the sand, the trees, the rocks, everything.

…Yet she stood resolute.

Motionless.

Not a single rock came to her aid – she did not will one to.

Because, while the one before her had the appearance of a monster, she knew otherwise. The way he talked about his father, the look in his eye when he spoke about the man as though he were a legend…a monster did not stand before her. What stood before her was a boy.  

Just a boy. A boy in insurmountable grief that had twisted into denial.

So she stood firm, refusing to summon her defenses, knowing that it could be her demise. This was not the time for a fight, just words. Only words.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

The yordle’s shoulders dropped just the slightest bit. His ears shifted back like doubt had seized his heart. “What? What…what are you talking about?”

“Your father, what did he call you? In those days you spent together, all those times you remember fondly…what did he call you?”

The yordle took a step back. The fire in his eyes dimmed, reduced to a smolder of what it once was. “How…how should I know? I don’t remember, so what does it matter? It’s pointless. You’re being stupid you…you stupid trader.”

Taliyah opened the journal to its final entry. “The yordle in the cart, the man who spent his life searching for his son, left a final message to his child. What do you think the child’s name was? What did the man write?”

The yordle’s jaw gaped like he struggled to breathe. “No…that’s not…you’re not… It’s a lie. You’re lying again you…you filthy trader! Stop it! You wrote that thing! It has nothing to do with me! It has nothing to do with anythi—”

“Mahotis,” she said. “Your name is Mahotis.”

The creature trembled, shaking like he was about to freeze, the fire in his eyes smothered by the cold, by tears flowing freely and matting his fur. Everything clenched, everything shook, and he struggled to hold his head lest it shatter apart. Taliyah caught a glimpse of her eyes, of his precious golden orbs clouded with despair, their fire extinguished.

Her heart lurched.

So did he.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” He leapt at Taliyah, clawing at her torso and shredding her ropes while his obsidian teeth latched onto her shoulder. They easily pierced her clothing and buried themselves deep into the flesh beneath.

The pain was instantaneous, white-hot and seething. She staggered, struggling between his weight and the pain to keep her footing, hissing between her teeth. Yet she stood firm as the yordle bit down deeper, as he tore long, savage holes into her long ruined robes. The little brown creature screamed into her shoulder, his voice broken with wracking sobs.

Taliyah raised a hand. Instead of tearing the vicious little demon off, instead of beating away the vile creature, instead of any of the things her instincts told her to do. She ran her fingers gingerly through the fur on its back, rubbing up and down in shaky, yet soothing strokes.

Because it wasn’t a monster clawing at her, not a beast of the desert. It was just a child, a child in mourning. One who held monstrous strength, yet used not an ounce as he tore at the person who caused him such pain.

“It’s ok,” Taliyah whispered, stroking the fur between his heaving shoulders. “It’s okay. If hurting me makes it better, I don’t mind.”

The yordle’s screams devolved into sobs, tears streaming down his face and matting the fur as the robes around his teeth grew a damp, deeper crimson.

Taliyah stood resolute, bearing the pain with a grimace though she felt like screaming. Soon, his kicks and scrapes turned to simply clutching her robes, just hanging there motionless. His jaw shifted, then released her shoulder, a disgustingly meaty sound pounding Taliyah’s ears.

For the first time, she worried that she might lose the arm.

Slowly, carefully, she gripped the yordle by the scruff and pulled him away. His claws clung to her robes for a moment, then released as he hung limp. Taliyah sat him on the ground, allowing him to hunch over. He didn’t have the will to sit up.

For a moment, Taliyah looked at him, broken and defeated. His muzzle, the one she had found cute when she first saw it, was coated in blood. Yet he didn’t seem to care, staring at her legs, yet staring at nothing as the red liquid dripped on his pants and trickled down his throat.

Perhaps that was how he looked when he killed her sheep.

Her shoulder throbbed. She clutched it, feeling the pain she had beaten down rise to a boiling point as the blood flowed down her arm and dripped off her fingers. Thinking fast, she rushed over to the yordle’s bag, undid the knot holding the rope tight, and ripped the line off, leaving the contents to spill to the ground.

The yordle didn’t even flinch.

Taliyah discarded her robe – it was beyond destroyed anyway – and inspected the wound. It was deep, but not messy. The yordle had bit straight down, he did not rip and tear like a Sandswimmer would have done.

She tied the rope into a tourniquet further up from the bite. The blood, which had flown freely from the wound, slowed to an ebb.

She would survive, but she needed to get back to the caravan soon or risk infection. Her thoughts jumped to traveling on a rock, thought that offered its own issues. Would she be able to focus through the pain? Could she find her way back? The sun was to set soon – would she even be able to see her way?

Taliyah felt lightheaded, but she had to try.

“Mahotis,” she called out, answered with silence. “I need to get back to the caravan. I’ll come back tomorrow for you.”

Again, he said nothing. Taliyah walked back over to the yordle, crouched before him, and grasped his chin, wet with her own blood. She tilted his head back, looking into his vacant eyes. “I promise, I’ll come back for you.”

Then, with a final goodbye, she stepped back, summoned a rock, then flew across the oasis and back the way she came. The foliage below passed in a flash of green, the vast expanse traversed in an instant.

Taliyah’s journey to the oasis had taken an entire day as she diligently followed the trail of her fallen sheep across brief stretched of sand and through the winding canyons surrounding the hidden sanctuary. Now, however, there was no need for such caution. She flew above the rock formations, high enough that the paths she had taken appeared as little more than cracks in the wide expanse of rock. A distance that had been walked in a day could, at her speed, be cut down to as little as a half hour.

High in the sky, there was no need to focus on obstacles or losing her way. Night would fall soon and, given her excellent vantage, Taliyah would have no issue spotting the torches lit by her caravan to ward off predators.

Predators…huh.

Perhaps it was the blood loss, or perhaps a distraction from the wind in her ears, but she couldn’t stop fixating on that word. Over and over she repeated it in her mind, always accompanied by an image of the desert’s savage creatures. A Sandswimmer. An Outerbeast. Perhaps even those creatures that were never named, those beasts that always seemed to dwell at the very edge of sight, those that silently stalk as one staggers through the sand.

And yet, no matter how she argued otherwise, she couldn’t fit Mahotis onto the list. “ _He was violent,_ ” she argued. “ _His teeth were sharp and claws deadly, he tried to kill me, and my arm is…_ ”

There was no use trying. Despite everything the yordle had done, she could plainly see why. Fear. Desperation. Denial. Mourning. Everything he did, from the attack to the bite to the rudeness to the sheep killing, all could be expected from a confused, scared child in the harshest environment Runeterra had to offer.

She nodded to herself. Any uncertainty she had was quashed; she would return to the oasis when the sun rose once more, retrieve the yordle and his belongings, and then officially invite him into the caravan. Once he had apologized for killing her sheep, technically owned by her father, she would feverishly campaign that he be accepted as a permanent member.

And yet, why did her head pound so?

Her wound had clotted, enough so that she had removed the tourniquet with only a small dribble of blood as a consequence. Perhaps it wasn’t necessary in the first place; she was a shepherd, not a healer. There was not nearly enough blood missing, and her home was mere minutes away, yet her head pounded like a ceremonial drum.

She spotted the lanterns on the sand, freshly lit and offering pricks of light against the nearly setting sun. Below her, grazing on the meager weeds Shurima was best at growing, was her flock. From her vantage, their while fleece appeared orange in the dimming light.

And then, where none of the others dared approach, was a massive splotch of red across the sandy ground. Taliyah remembered waking up in the night to the death throes of her precious ewe, arriving only to find blood and gore splattered across the earth. It was rich, fresh, smelled horribly thick, and, most importantly, lead off into the night.

It was a massacre. A messy, wild slaughter as her ewe was clearly torn limb from limb. Her blood splashed across the surface like a sick abstract painting.

And yet, she couldn’t picture Mahotis doing that. She couldn’t imagine him down there, amongst her flock, tearing savagely into the guts of her innocent sheep, his fluffy brown fur matted with blood and stinking of iron. No matter how much she tried, she–

Wait.

Taliyah slowed her rock to a crawl.

When she had met the yordle, on the shore of the pool as they faced off against each other, his fur was clean. If not for the dust and rubble that came from demolishing her attacks, it would have been pristine. How had he managed to be so clean after a slaughter that had taken place only a night before? When he likely arrived at the oasis shortly before she had? He would have no reason to run back, and such short legs would never make as much progress as she could.

Taliyah held a hand over her forehead, trying as hard as she could to remember exactly what had been said. After they fought, Taliyah had asked to wash in another pool, one that wasn’t filled to the brim with quicksand. But, as the yordle had said, there was only one in the oasis.

That meant that the pool she had laid her trap beside, the one she had spent a massive portion of the night carefully burying slate under the sand, was the one he must have used to wash. Not once, however, did she see any tracks leading to or from the water; there was no chance that she would ever miss a detail that could have revealed more about the predator. This meant that Mahotis had not washed himself that day; there was no other water source for nearly a hundred kilometers

But that didn’t make sense. The sight before her, the one she had descended to for a more thorough examination, was an absolute bloodbath. There wasn’t the slightest chance that the yordle wouldn’t have come out drenched. Even if he had used a pelt to block the blood, there would still be a need to wash the hands and feet.

Then she realized; her sheep’s pelt wasn’t there.

“ _Mahotis would never have gotten rid of the pelt,_ ” Taliyah realized, pacing her perch as the flock bellowed in the distance. When she had visited his camp, there wasn’t a single glimpse of a white pelt to be had on the pile. Had it been there, she would have locked onto it instantly.

It hadn’t been drying in the camp either. At that point in time, the pelt would’ve needed time to dry under the sun. Not to mention the meat, which would have been dried or smoked or cooked, yet not a shred could be seen among his rations, only the fruit of the oasis. He couldn’t have eaten it raw, lest his face be caked in blood.

How could that possibly be? She even had his admission, didn’t she?

“ _He said he kills, but he didn’t mention actually killing my sheep._ ” That wasn’t an admission. It was recognition that he killed, not that he killed something specific. He hadn’t even known what a sheep was, yet he could name other desert creature easily. He didn’t even recognize the sound ‘baa,’ which, as her herd continued to supply, was quite distinct.

Yet the trail was still there, the one leading across the land through winding paths, only to disappear right before the oasis, right before—

Taliyah froze where she stood, growing pale in a way completely unrelated to the wound on her shoulder. She remembered the canyon walls, the ones she had glanced to on a whim.

The stone had been carved out by something insanely strong, something with the force to burrow into the earth. When she had first seen the yordle’s monstrous strength, she had assumed it had been him who had carved it out.

But what reason had he to do so? What reason did the yordle have to dig deep into the rock face, what had he to gain? The answer—nothing. He had no motive to dig it out, to burrow into the cliff face. And yet, the bloody trail had ended ever so close to those craters, ones that stretched back into darkness. It hadn’t continued into the trees, it wasn’t anywhere to be seen in the oasis, it just ended.

Right there.

Next to the craters, ones she couldn’t see to the end of…tunnels. The bloody trail had ended next to a tunnel dug into the solid rock.

And what creature, besides Mahotis, could dig with such ungodly strength into solid rock?

The answer, one that sent Taliyah scrambling back to her perch and soaring through the air, one that forced her to ignore the throbbing pain in her arm, was often shared among her caravan as a horror story.

It was a monstrous amalgamation that only existed in nightmares, not something that should even be possible in Shurima, yet existed nonetheless – a calamity made flesh.

Xer’Sai, the Burrowers of the Void.

It didn’t matter how strong the yordle was. If he faced one alone, death was the only outcome.

Taliyah willed herself to move faster, the wind’s howl morphed into a deafening screech as she soared back the way she came. In her mind, there was hope. Xer’Sai cycled through months of sleep, then indulged in gorging periods throughout a week. It had obviously slept the night she set her trap. If Mahotis had indeed been at the oasis for a few weeks to see nothing, then it had only just woken from a sleep cycle.

It had decided to rest the day she waited on that shore – that was a stroke of luck. But luck was nothing to rely on.

Taliyah berated herself over and over. The burrows, the damned burrows. Even a child should have realized what they were, their bedtime stories often featured the monstrous creature. Yet she had stupidly passed it by and focused on the oasis. The emerald stretch of beauty had stolen her attention away from an obvious red flag, a mistake that could’ve easily led to her final night on that sandy shore.

And, if she wasn’t fast enough, it would lead to the death of a falsely accused yordle.

God damn it! Even the traders, the ones who had such an obsession with the yordle’s piercings, the ones who held a sword to his throat, the ones who had pointed off into the direction of his father’s corpse, hadn’t taken a single piercing from the body. Of course, they wouldn’t. No matter how precious the treasure, no fool would have spared another moment in the territory of a Xer’Sai.

When Taliyah finally arrived at the oasis, flying directly over the hollowed out cliff face she had discovered a day ago, it was to her worst fears.

The trees surrounding the burrow were toppled, pushed aside like blades of grass. The quicksand pit, the one that Mahotis had struggled to escape from, had exceeded its banks as though something massive had dredged through it. And finally, at the site of the yordle’s camp, was absolute carnage.

Mahotis stood his ground, back to the desert as he faced off against the monstrosity that emerged from the canyon walls.

It was a horror, far beyond the artistic depictions in her childhood story books. While she had expected a blue exoskeleton, broken occasionally with patches of purple skin, the sight below her was disgustingly otherworldly. The jagged plates were beyond sharp as though every surface had been deliberately filed like a knife by human hands. That was impossible, however, as any human seen by the creature would only have time for a single prayer. The only thing marring the plates were the rakes and gouges formed by the claws of other Xer’Sai, the only thing strong enough to make even a scratch in the impenetrable armor. Even its face, in the spaces around its pinpricked eyed, ones concealed by plates while it burrowed beneath the earth, was covered in the unbreakable things.

And the flesh below, peeking between the plates, was disgusting. There seemed to be no rhyme or rhythm to the purple flesh. It bulged where it should have laid flat, twisted when it should have held straight — all signs of a broken bone in any other creature. Though the forelimbs bulged with muscle, bunched together with wormlike texture, the four rear limbs were connected by small, stick-like rods of skin and bones. Even the mouth, the mottled gums that held the teeth at every angle, was nightmarish.

On the ground before the nightmare, Mahotis stood alone among the wreckage of his camp, his belongings strewn across the clearing and trampled to nothing.

He was injured. When they had faced each other on the shore, he sported an arrogant grin, one that projected confidence and vigor. There was no such smile now, replaced by a painful grimace while a head wound matted his fur. Though she couldn’t tell how much was his and how much was hers, there was no mistaking the slashes across his form contributed to of his red appearance, his formerly fluffy fur clung tightly to his skin.

He shifted his weight, clearly favoring one leg more than the other. Having gathered his resolve, the tiny yordle leapt at the monster, dodging a swipe as he scrambled atop the Xer’Sai’s back, trying with all his might to tear a plate from the body.

The monster responded like any animal – it bucked and kicked, rolling on the ground and crashing through trees in an attempt to dislodge the tiny pest. Yet the yordle held firm, clinging tight even when the monster rolled, alone capable of handling the full weight of its massive form.

At least until it bolted for the canyon wall, crashing into it hard enough to rattle the few standing trees. In a shower of rubble, it dragged its side, and Mahotis, across the cliff face. The rock in its path was obliterated, leaving deep gouges in its wake as it tore its way through the solid surface.

Its run continued around the oasis, obliterating most of the few remaining trees as it rained rock upon the canopy, not stopping until it had run all the way around the ‘U’ of the oasis and into the desert sands beyond. Then it slowed, shaking itself to dislodge the debris wedged between its plates.

Mahotis wasn’t clinging to it anymore.

While the creature shook itself like a dog, the small yordle sat motionless in the wake of its destruction, a tiny speck of red fur embedded in the stone.

He wasn’t moving.

Taliyah wanted to scream but bit her tongue. Blood pounded in her ears, far louder when it had just been her arm. Now it was fear. Fear of the creature. Fear of what it could do to her people, what could have happened had it not discovered the sheep first, what could still happen if it found them again.

But right now, what she feared most was that the yordle below, the yordle who held an indomitable drive to live, wasn’t moving. He wasn’t swearing as he had with her. He wasn’t demanding the creature fight fair, as he had with her. He wasn’t smiling that arrogant, confident smile, as he had with her.

No. He was crushed into the rocks, eyes closed, limbs hanging limp, and mouth dangling open as though he were trying to speak, yet no words came out.

The monster, having realized its little pest was gone, spotted the yordle wedged with the stone. Slowly it stalked closer, wary if its prey was simply feigning defeat. Taliyah knew that movement, the timid prowl with hunched shoulders, eyes refusing to leave its target. It was a predator, a true predator, preparing to finish what it started.

Taliyah wouldn’t accept that.

So she did something stupid.

The earth shook. As the Xer’Sai trampled upon the flattened remains of the oasis, the ground around it trembled, the trunks of fallen trees rattling against the earth. Then for a moment, just a brief moment, the creature looked to the heavens.

Taliyah looked back.

She smiled

The rumbling reached a fever pitch. Everything – the rocks, the trees, and the sand – all of it trembled as though afraid of what was soon to come.

A crack sounded. Then silence.

The monster refused to look away from the flying girl, as if was deciding whether it should kill her now or after the broken rat. It raised a forelimb, claws splayed with vicious intent.

Then the world itself roared as the cliff faces on either side of the monster, as though cut free from the earth by a godly sword, fell together like dominoes.

The creature roared, beaten with boulder after boulder as the world itself came crashing down. Stone rained down, trapping the abomination under the unopposable weight of an entire cliff side.

Yet, even as it lied buried by hundreds of tons of solid rock, the roars did not stop.

There was no time to lose. Even as Taliyah descended to Mahotis, through the corner of her eye, she spotted a limb break free from the pile, clawing at the surrounding stone. It wasn’t a surprise. For a creature that spent most of its life buried under hundreds of thousands of tons of stone, its plating and bones grew harder than diamonds. Mahotis actually had the right idea, tearing them free and piercing the tender flesh beneath was the only recorded way a Xer’Sai had fallen to mortal hands. The one and only recorded way.

Taliyah approached the yordle, hopping down from her perch and pressing a hand to his bloody, matted chest. To her relief, it rose and fell in long, drawn out breaths.

“Thank God,” Taliyah said, gathering the little creature in her arms and hopping back on her awaiting rock. From across the flattened oasis, the Xer’Sai roared its fury, watching the girl steal away its prey. It had dragged its body out from beneath the earth, shrugging off the pressure like it was nothing.

It charged at the pair as Taliyah willed her stone to fly away. It leapt, claws outstretched, reaching for the girl and the bloody yordle held against her chest with her good arm. Taliyah’s heart froze, motionless inside her chest as she watched that clawed limb growing closer and closer, every second moving like an eternity. Her eyes locked with the monster’s, with small, infinitely dark pools, ingrained within the terrifying face. As the blood roared in her ears, Taliyah realized that death resided within those eyes.

Then, like a miracle, gravity took hold. The creature’s outstretched claw, the savage, razor-sharp thing only scrapped a shallow gouge on the underside of the rock. Then the beast fell, crashing into the cliff side as Taliyah shouted her exhilaration, quickly regaining her balance.

Higher and higher they rose, outside the reach of the creature below – far beyond the monstrosity that roared its fury into the heavens.

Taliyah looked at her ward, the blood covered fighter resting in her arms. Slowly, carefully, she pulled him in close, nestling his head beneath her chest, directing her rock to carry the pair towards the caravan.

Mahotis stirred, opening hazy, unfocused eyes. “Dad?”

“Not quite yet,” Taliyah assured, pulling him into a hug. “Not quite yet.”


	3. A Father's Final Effort

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Taliyah couldn't quite translate the ancient text of the journal...but Mahotis could.

**_I have aged. However many years have passed since I’ve seen your face, smiling bright in the glow of the forge, trembling with excitement over our latest project. My son, I am sorry. So very, truly sorry I was never able to see that face again, for you to see mine. Though I’ve traveled far, I could never find a trace of you. In the wake of the kingdom’s collapse, I feared you had been killed. Perhaps you had. Perhaps I am simply a stubborn old fool who could never accept reality. But when I picture you alone out there, scared of the world I’ve yet to prepare you for, I couldn’t remain idle._ **

**_And yet here I sit, dying not by the desert’s hands, but by the betrayal of my aged body. Would you recognize me if I found you? Would you see the old, shriveled me as the one who carried you on his back when you were young? Guided your hands as you hammered away at your first sword? Who waved you off the night you disappeared? I hoped you would. I always hoped. Perhaps the next time I close my eyes, I’ll open them to you again, joined at last in the afterlife._ **

**_But I hope not. I don’t want to have outlived you. I wish more than anything else, despite the horrible things that might have happened to you, that you managed to live. I wish you’ve lived a happy, full life surrounded by people that make you just as happy as you made me. I wish, with every fiber of my being I wish, that I will able to look down upon you soon, as happy as you deserve to be._ **

**_Mahotis, my only child, I shall be with you always._ **

 

**__ **


End file.
